Given the influx of “social” technologies that allow us to interact superficially with greater numbers of people, has the quality of our sociality decreased? Do the youthful generations have less social skills and a lesser desire to use them as a result?
alright, now we have a thread that correlates with its title
I think we are less social. Face to face interactions are no longer required. In the future, when everything comes to us and we don’t need to leave our massive “connected” towers, we will probably have more artificial virtual friends than real ones. And if they are better friends, we won’t mind.
Today people will leave a conversation abrubtly and when they return they pick up the conversation we’re they left off. That seems to mirror a conversation on a forum such as this, or a text when you don’t reply straight away. Older generations would probably call that rude.
I won’t say language is on the downslide, but it is changing. Fragments are used without completing a thought. And communication is the social bridge.
I talk to more people online and through videogame headsets (stangers whose names I never ask for) than face to face talk with anybody I know.
I think many younger people already have this.
I don’t think I’ve ever really seen this. What do you mean by “leave a conversation”?
Exactly, but what I think the solution (or perhaps a perspective) is that while they are more numerous, they are less meaningful. I question whether face to face interaction and personality will ever really fade so long as most of us value it differently (note, different =/= quantification and quantification wouldn’t be helpful in value judgement anyway) from the rest.
For example, many people have thousands of “friends” on facebook. But they aren’t really friends, we have maybe 10 or 12 actual friends at a time. Our minds and chemical structures won’t really let us have more. So facebook introduces that “close friend” thing. Myspace had a top 8, and people created code to give themselves a top 30 so as not to offend. It seems like we’re trying to expand from that 10 or 12 to 30 or hundreds but I don’t think we’ll ever actually succeed. It’s a push/pull thing. We push away from the small group but get pulled back once we’re lonely. I think we’ll see the same thing as a society.
An example would be comparing Skype to instant messaging. Until recently communication over the internet was text, now we want to see each other’s faces again. I think it’s a good sign.
We are less present where we are. Distraction, including more complete forms of dissociation from where we are, who we are with, etc., like films and music, is more the rule. It is easier to not be with what we are physically with. It is easier not to have a moment’s quiet where backlogged emotions might actually surface. Of course these distractions and immersions can be social, at least social-ish, so there is one step forward, in this category of being social, while there are several steps backward, away from reality, the world, the manifest, incarnation…I can’t wait until most people upload themselves, frankly.